THE MOST FAMOUS ALASKAN GLACIER
That little house nestling at the base of a precipitous mountain, and
still nearly a mile away, was just then a more fascinating sight to
our half-starved, toil-worn travellers than even the sea itself, and,
filled with a hopeful excitement, they hastened towards it. The way
led down a steep incline, and along a shallow, treeless valley, shut
off from the water on their right by a ridge a hundred feet or so in
height. From this depression the house was hidden until they were
directly upon it; but the knowledge that it was there filled them with
cheerful anticipations of food, warmth, rest, and a hearty welcome from
people of their own race. It was probably a salmon cannery or saltery,
or a trading-post. At any rate, the one house they had discovered was
that of a white man; for it had a chimney, and none of the Tlingits or
natives of southern Alaska build chimneys.
While Phil and Jalap Coombs were full of confidence that a few minutes
more would find them in a settlement of white men, Serge was greatly
puzzled, and, though he said little, kept up a deal of thinking as
he tugged at the rawhide sledge-trace. He felt that he ought to know
the place, for he did not believe they were more than one hundred
miles from Sitka; but he could not remember having heard of any white
settlement on that part of the coast, except at the Chilkat cannery,
and this place did not correspond in any particular with what he had
heard of that.
At length they rounded the last low spur of the ridge, and came
upon the house only a few rods away. For a few moments they stood
motionless, regarding it in silence, and with a bitter disappointment.
It was roughly but substantially constructed of sawed lumber, had a
shingled roof, two glass windows, a heavy door, and a great outside
chimney of rough stone. But it was closed and deserted. No hospitable
smoke curled from its chimney, there was no voice of welcome nor sign
of human presence. Nor was there another building of any kind in sight.
The little cabin in the now distant wilderness from which Phil had
taken Nel-te had not been more lonely than this one.
“I suppose we may as well keep on and examine the interior now that
we’ve come so far,” said Phil, in a disgusted tone that readily
betrayed his feelings. “There doesn’t seem to be any one around to
prevent us. I only wish there was.”
So they pushed open the door, which was fastened but not locked, and
stepped inside. The cabin contained but a single large room furnished
with several sleeping-bunks, a stout table, and a number of seats, all
home-made from unplaned lumber. Much rubbish, including empty bottles
and tin cans, was scattered about; but it was evident that everything
of value had been removed by the last occupants. The chief feature of
the room was an immense and rudely artistic fireplace at its farther
end. Above this hung a smooth board skilfully decorated with charcoal
sketches, and bearing the legend “Camp Muir.”
As Serge caught sight of this he uttered an exclamation. “Now I know
where we are!” he cried. “Come with me, Phil, and I will show you one
of the grand sights of the world.”
With this he dashed out of the door, and ran towards the beach ridge
behind which the cabin stood. Phil followed, wondering curiously what
his friend could mean. As they reached the low crest of the ridge he
understood; for outspread before him, bathed in a rosy light by the
setting sun, was a spectacle that tourists travel from all parts of the
world to gaze upon.
A precipitous line of ice-cliffs of marble whiteness or heavenly blue,
two miles long and hundreds of feet in height, carved into spires,
pinnacles, minarets, and a thousand other fantastic shapes, rose in
frozen majesty at the head of a little bay whose waters washed the
beach at their feet. Ere either of the boys could find words to express
his delight and wonder, a huge mass of the lofty wall broke away and
plunged into the sea, with a thunderous roar that echoed and re-echoed
from the enclosing mountains. For a moment it disappeared in a milky
cloud of foam and spray. Then it shot up from the depths like some
stupendous submarine monster, and, with torrents of water streaming
from it in glittering cascades, floated on the heaving surface a
new-born iceberg.
“It must be a glacier,” said Phil, in an awe-stricken tone.
“It is a glacier,” answered Serge, triumphantly, “and one of the
most famous in the world, for it is the MUIR, which is larger and
contains more ice than all the eleven hundred glaciers of Switzerland
put together. That cabin is the one occupied by John Muir and his
companions when they explored it in 1890. To think that we should have
come down one of its branches, and even crossed the great glacier
itself, without knowing what it was! I believe we would have known it,
though, if the snow hadn’t been so deep as to alter the whole character
of its surface.”
“If this is the Muir Glacier,” reflected Phil, “I don’t see but what
we are in a box. We must be to the westward of Chilkat.”
“Yes,” said Serge. “It lies to the eastward of those mountains.”
“Which don’t look as though they would be very easy even for us to
climb, while I know we couldn’t get Jalap and Nel-te over them. I don’t
suppose any tourist steamers will be visiting this place for some time,
either.”
“Not for two months at least,” replied Serge.
“Which is longer than we can afford to wait without provisions or
supplies of any kind. So we shall have to get away, somehow, and pretty
quickly too. It doesn’t look as though we could follow the coast any
farther, though; for just below here the cliffs seem to rise sheer from
the water.”
“No,” said Serge, “we can’t. We can only get out by boat or by scaling
the mountains.”
“In which case we shall starve to death before we have a chance to do
either,” retorted Phil, gloomily, “for we are pretty nearly starved
now. In fact, old man, it looks as though the good-fortune that has
stood by us during the whole of this journey had deserted us at its
very end.”
By this time the boys had strolled back to the cabin, which was left
by the setting sun in a dark shadow. As they turned its corner they
came upon Nel-te standing outside clapping his chubby hands, and
gazing upward in an ecstasy of delight. Following the child’s glance
Phil uttered a startled exclamation, and sprang through the doorway. A
moment later he emerged, rifle in hand.
High up on a shoulder of the mountain, hundreds of feet above the
cabin, sharply outlined against the sky, and bathed in the full glory
of the setting sun, a mountain goat, with immensely thick hair of snowy
white, and sharp black horns, stood as motionless as though carved
from marble. Blinded by the sunlight, and believing himself to be
surrounded by a solitude untenanted by enemies, he saw not the quietly
moving figures in the dim shadows beneath him.
Twice did Phil raise his rifle and twice did he lower it, so tremulous
was he with excitement and a knowledge that four human lives depended
on the result of his shot. The third time he took a quick aim and
fired. As the report echoed sharply from the beetling cliffs, the
stricken animal gave a mighty leap straight out into space, and came
whirling downward like a great white bird with broken wings. He struck
twice, but bounded off each time, and finally lay motionless, buried in
the snow at the very foot of the mountain that had been his home.
“Hurrah!” shouted Phil. “No starvation this time! Luck _is_ still with
us, after all. That is, Nel-te is still with us, and he seems to carry
good luck; for we certainly should not have seen that fellow but for
the little chap. So, hurrah, old man!”
But Serge needed no urging this time to shout as loudly as Phil, though
while he shouted he got the sledge ready for bringing in their game.
“Seeing as how we hain’t got no fire nor no matches, I reckon we’ll eat
our meat raw, like the Huskies,” said Jalap Coombs, dryly, a little
later, as they began to skin and cut up the goat.
“Whew!” ejaculated Phil. “I never thought of that. But I know how to
make a fire with the powder from a cartridge, if one of you can furnish
a bit of cotton cloth.”
“It seems a pity to waste a cartridge,” said Serge, “when we haven’t
but three or four left, and a single one has just done so much for us.
I think I can get fire in a much more economical way.”
“How?” queried Phil.
“Ye won’t find no brimstone nor yet feathers here,” suggested Jalap
Coombs, with a shake of his head.
“Never mind,” laughed Serge; “you two keep on cutting up the goat, and
by the time your job is completed I think I can promise that mine will
be.” So saying, Serge entered the cabin and closed the door.
In a pile of rubbish he had noticed several small pieces of wood and
a quantity of very dry botanical specimens, some of which bore fluffy
seed-vessels that could be used as tinder. He selected a bit of soft
pine, and worked a small hole in it with the point of his knife. Next
he whittled out a thick pencil of the hardest wood he could find,
sharpened one end and rounded the other. In a block of hard wood he dug
a cavity, into which the rounded top of the pencil would fit. He found
a section of barrel hoop, and strung it very loosely with a length
of rawhide from a dog harness, so as to make a small bow. Finally he
took a turn of the bow-string about the pencil, fitted the point into
the soft pine that rested on the floor, and the other end into the
hard-wood block, on which he leaned his breast.
With one hand he now drew the bow swiftly to and fro, causing the
pencil to revolve with great rapidity, and with the other he held a
small quantity of tinder close to its point of contact with the soft
pine. The rapid movement of the pencil produced a few grains of fine
sawdust, and this shortly began to smoke with the heat of friction.
In less than one minute the sawdust and tinder were in a glow that a
breath fanned into a flame, and there was no longer any doubt about a
fire.[1]
[1] This is the Eskimo method; and I have seen a Norton Sound
Eskimo woman obtain fire by this simple means inside of ten
seconds.――K. M.
[Illustration: SERGE’S METHOD OF LIGHTING A FIRE]
That evening, as our friends sat contentedly in front of a cheerful
blaze, after a more satisfactory meal than they had enjoyed for many a
day, Jalap Coombs remarked that he only wanted one more thing to make
him perfectly happy.
“Same here,” said Phil. “What’s your want?”
“A pipeful of tobacco,” replied the sailor, whose whole smoking outfit
had been lost with his sledge.
“All I want,” laughed Phil, “is to know how and when we are to get out
of this trap, and continue our journey to Sitka. I hate the thought of
spending a couple of months here, even if there are plenty of goats.”
“I can’t think of anything else we can do,” said Serge, thoughtfully.
And yet those who were to rescue them from their perplexing situation
were within five miles of them at that very moment.